Document Type
Presentation
Publication Date
8-1-2014
Abstract
The Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) developed a comprehensive Surveillance and Response System (SRS) (formerly Contamination Warning System) for its drinking water system under a Water Security initiative grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A full-scale SRS is comprised of four monitoring/surveillance components – online water quality monitoring (OWQM), enhanced security monitoring, consumer complaint surveillance, and public health surveillance, and two response components – consequence management and sampling and analysis. The integration of multiple information streams is a core element of an SRS. Taken separately, each surveillance component provides its own set of event triggers that have value for event detection. For example, OWQM data is extracted from the ClearSCADA Historian which synchronizes with OWQM station data repositories every two minutes, and is filtered through a Kisters WISKI database and the BlueBox Event Detection System where anomalous data creates alerts. However, contamination events typically involve more than one component and by comparing multiple data streams events can be more accurately validated and investigated. In this project information from four surveillance components were integrated into a centralized platform and displayed on the SRS Dashboard. Thus the Dashboard was used a) to determine whether a water contamination event has occurred and b) to activate appropriate response components, i.e. consequence management and sampling analysis. The SRS Dashboard serves as a centralized SRS event data management, incident investigation, and issue resolution platform for PWD. The SRS Dashboard provides automatic event detection, opportunity for preliminary cross-component data analysis and map display for quick response and coordination among a large group of users, including PWD, Philadelphia Department of Public Health, and other agencies. This paper provides an overview of the SRS Dashboard and presents some case studies where the dashboard was used to resolve water quality issues in the water distribution system.
Comments
Session R61, Reservoir Operations and Management II